Re: Palm Pilots -- the electric can opener of organization devices ?

Tim923 wrote: 
A few years ago when I got my Palm Pilot Zire 21, I was very
interested in them.  They were so neat to play around with.  I liked
the calendar and address features.  However, gradually I used them
less and less, and went back to calendars on 8.5x11 paper sheets.  I
found it easier just to pencil in items rather than use the special
notation or do a USB transfer.  Paper is also portable.


Well, I don't want to state the obvious, but PDAs are portable as well.
That's what the "P" stands for.  :-)

Anyway, the reason I got a PDA (about 9 or 10 years ago) was that
paper wasn't working for me.  Sure, I can write things on paper.  But
the problem is that I write things down and then proceed to lose the
*** of paper it is written on.  I had a mound of Post-It notes with
people's phone numbers on them piled on my desk, and parts of this mound
would periodically fall off the edge into oblivion as more got pressed
into the top, kind of like those games at the arcade where, if you're
lucky, the edge of a big pile of tokens will fall your way when you
drop a token into a slot.

So, I got a Pilot 1000, and I started entering phone numbers and
appointments and things into it.  Lo and behold, it was sort of fun,
and because it was fun, I was motivated to use it.  Since the Pilot
(and the Palm models that have replaced it) is expensive, I haven't
lost it.  I lose piece of paper all the time, though, because they're
not expensive enough for me to feel bad if I lose one of them.  Plus,
it's really nice to have everything in such a compact form -- there's
only one thing to not lose instead of a whole slew of pieces of paper
to not lose.

And, even if I did lose it, I hotsync often enough that I would still
have all the data.  Yes, I'd have to go get a new Palm (or buy a used
one on eBay), but at least I would still have all my data.

By the way, I find the hotsync process laborious if you're using it
to enter an appointment on the desktop and then transfer it to the
Palm.  I use hotsync to back up my data, but I always enter the data
on the Palm.  After you spend a little while learning Graffiti, it
becomes second nature, and while the speed isn't quite as high as
with normal handwriting, it's high enough when you're only writing
2 or 3 words anyway.

  - Logan
.

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